Jump On Civil 3D Blog

Our annotative work is mission critical to our performance and productivity in Autodesk Civil 3D. People do complain about the nuance and complexity of Civil 3D annotation. The work is on the mission critical path of the successful execution of the multiple deliverable sets of any civil engineering or survey project. Best we pay attention and acquire…

  Read more

There are uncomfortable and unexpected truths squirrelled away in the simplest annotative tasks in Autodesk Civil 3D. Model-based software means some basic tasks are fundamentally different and more complex for seemingly no apparent reason. There is a reason as we shall see.

Indeed, some planned and managed complexity can provide us with more bang for the…

  Read more

Let’s face it. Most of the time in Autodesk Civil 3D we all tend to initially shoot for some form of published annotation. It’s an old school CAD User’s habit. Let’s call this the lust for One and Done. For surveyors this may mean Point data out of Survey Dbs. The Lord knows, I hope you have moved beyond imported point files and COGO points to better manage your…

  Read more

Most of us who employ Civil 3D in production environments are familiar with the mechanics to replace External References (XREF) in our working and/or publication drawings. The Survey dept updates the existing annotation for the proposed project’s Parcel map. Survey can overwrite the previously shared XREF drawing, and/or provide a separate and differently named drawing for project…

  Read more

Autodesk introduced a new and much improved manage Data References tool in Autodesk Civil 3D 2020.1+. Autodesk also cascaded that same mission-critical code back into the Civil 3D 2019.3+ Updates. If you employ a reasonably current version of Civil 3D, there is better Data Reference (DREF) fix it tool. At the time, Autodesk sort of made a big deal about this. We all know that some…

  Read more